Punk Rock Heart

Narrative by Chris Martin, Posted February 3, 2026

Image courtesy of the author

Semioticians analyze symbols, so for this series, we’ve asked 25 of our semio colleagues from around the world to explicate the symbolism of… one of their own tattoos.

I was approaching a year into my ethnography at a tattoo studio/art gallery in Ottawa when my dear friend and main research informant Alex Néron (1977-2018) said to me “hey, you want me to give you a skull tattoo?” Easy question. I said: “Sure, but let’s make it the Alkaline Trio logo!” I could barely find a place to fit it on my right arm which, by this point, was covered in ink representing a bricolage of various signifiers, tied together by the random dots and stars (we called them ‘pepper stars’) which, since the mid 20^th century, have come to connote the Americana old-school tattooing tradition made famous by the likes of Sailor Jerry and Ed Hardy.

I was born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland — a city that can claim to be the oldest since colonial expansion in North America, and is the most easterly point of the continent. The strong accents (drop the H or add it at random), the architecture, and the musical traditions all point to mainly Irish lineage. I started playing guitar and singing along to punk rock at 15. After a year I was fully committed with my mates to the idea of playing downtown St. John’s on George Street. George Street has tourist trap elements of being a street of only bars; some of which host “screech-in ceremonies” where you can kiss a cod fish, down some Screech rum, and recite a nonsensical phrase to be an ‘honorary Newfoundlander.” We would be down there every other weekend playing our hearts out, with the amp’s distortion cranked, covering songs from bands like Alkaline Trio to audiences of mostly our friends in ‘the scene’ while the bars on the main stretch were packed to the brim with tourists seeking honorary Newfie status while striking a jig to the sounds of fiddles and the bodhrán (a small Irish drum).

When I wrote The Social Semiotics of Tattoos: Skin and Self (2018) for Bloomsbury Academic’s Advances in Semiotics Series — through the encouragement of the great semiotician Paul Bouissac — I adopted two ways to classify the polysemy inherent in tattoos. I found these concepts from my own PhD supervisor Stephen Riggins. Riggins had two terms of referencing and mapping as part of a methodology he designed in the 1990s to study the meanings behind the ‘things’ and objects people have in their living rooms.

Referencing points to the cultural and historical elements signified within a symbol or sign. Mapping is a term that helps explain how people map out their own personal lives and biographies into ‘things’. This essay has allowed me to map out some of the elements of my own personal biography that speak to me as I look down at my punk rock heart.

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